Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The great thing about belonging to Tuesdays with Dorie is that every week (nearly), I’m making something that I most likely wouldn’t make on my own. Seriously. I’m not a super adventurous person (particularly when it comes to my sweet tooth) and if it’s not something that contains chocolate, cream cheese, peanut butter, caramel, or pecans… I’m not initially drawn to it. So, this is a great way to not only learn new baking techniques and get practice in the kitchen… but to also stretch my culinary brain.

Granted, I may not love every recipe, but I can assure you, I do love making every one of them.

She chose the Chocolate Banded Ice Cream Torte. Which is basically ice cream with frozen ganache layered in it.

I do love ice cream. And I have no problems sitting down with a bowl of ice cream, but I just don’t generally eat a lot of ice cream. So, this isn’t really a recipe that I would ever make on my own. My thoughts would be…. Why don’t you just buy some ice cream and pour some fudge sauce on it… voila… lazy man’s Ice Cream Torte. And then I tell myself… well, Amy… you don’t do that because that’s just not as pretty and interesting, that’s why. (Although, yes, my looks like crap… but more on that to come).

I found myself, grocery list in hand, wandering the frozen treats section of my grocery store (a section I never venture into, because I never buy ice cream). My intention was to buy a generic-y pint (hopefully) of vanilla frozen yogurt. Which apparently doesn’t exist. Seriously? People don’t buy pints of vanilla frozen yogurt? Ugh. I vowed to try another grocery store later in the week and walked out of the store sans frozen treats.

Later in the week, I got the idea… hey… why don’t I just make my own ice cream! I had just made my first batch of ice cream a few weeks ago and found how easy it was even without an ice cream maker. Since I didn’t care for the blueberry ice cream and threw it out, I thought this would be a great opportunity to try the homemade ice cream again in a flavor I would enjoy.

This is how you know it's the right consistency...

I made Dorie’s Vanilla Ice Cream recipe and to kick it up a bit, I added some crushed Oreo’s and some Bailey’s Irish Cream once the ice cream was softly frozen. I called this frozen concoction… Cookies and Irish Cream. The ice cream turned out delicious and it was pretty initially (until I tried to soften it to use in the torte with a hand-mixer and it quickly turned from a black and white marbled look to a muddled grey).

Everything's a little better with booze, right?

Now it was time to make the ganache. It’s funny. I sit down every week with my Baking: From My Home To Yours and read through the next recipe and write down all the ingredients that I need to buy… somehow… it completely slipped my mind that I didn’t have anymore chocolate chips until I was getting a bowl out of the cabinet to start the ganache. Crap. Obviously, I could run out and pick up some… but I rummaged around my baking cabinet for possible substutions… The first thing I thought of was that I could do a white chocolate ganache instead. And then I thought that it would not only be too sweet with the ice cream I made, that the color would just look disgusting with the grey interior… I dug futher in my cabinet and spotted some unsweetened baking chocolate. At first I thought it might even have some kind of conversion chart on it for adding sugar to make it semi-sweet, etc… but, it didn’t.

I decided to just go with it anyway and I used a boatload of corn syrup to sweeten it (maybe I could have used sugar, but I thought that corn syrup would be better for the consistency).

The rest of the recipe came together easily. I got lazy with the freezing and re-freezing (I mean, heck.. when you make your own ice cream without an ice cream maker and THEN you start all this additional ganache freezing you feel like you’re in and out of the freezer about zillion times) and omitted the middle layer of ganache. I halved the recipe and used a quart size glass mixing bowl to make it in.

It’s good. The ganache is tasty and the ice cream is awesome…. But, honestly… next time I’ll just scoop out some ice cream and pour some fudge sauce on it.